Image Is Everything in Tennessee Politics

The year before I ran for the state Senate, a person I did not know came up to me at a Christian event in my hometown and said, “I think you should run for the Legislature.” His reason shocked me, but this incident came to mind because of something one of our leading state elected officials said last week.

The reason given by the person who suggested I run was that I, along with my attractive wife and cute 5-year-old daughter, would be visually appealing to voters. It turned out that this person was a successful political campaign consultant. But I got his point: image means a lot, if not everything, in politics.

In Tennessee, part of the image you want to create in order to appeal to our generally conservative and generally Christianized electorate is that you are a Christian, a person of faith. And one of the best ways to do that is to use language that tickles Christian ears.

So, it was with great interest that I read this recent statement by one of our elected officials: “[E]very man and woman created in the image of God deserves meaningful work.”

To affirm the image of God as central to our humanity is to speak the Christian’s lingo and probably to earn the Christian’s approbation for being willing to put one’s Christian faith on public display.

But it’s important that Christians understand what the image of God means and then evaluate that politician’s grasp of that meaning by how he or she applies it in other contexts in which that image is equally important.

Dissecting What It Means to Be Created in God’s Image

In the present situation, we know that the Bible refers to God’s acts of creation as work, so it is true that the image of God means that it is good for human beings to work. However, I would add that any work, when done for the glory of God, is meaningful work, regardless of what one is paid or how highly others esteem one’s work.

But the Bible gives us another aspect of the image of God, one we don’t even have to extrapolate by analogy to what God does. It says, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27 NKJV). It is clear that being male and female is a part of the image of God our humanity bears.

In case there is any doubt about this, Genesis 2 makes it very clear. In that chapter, we’re given more detail. God makes the man, Adam, first and then stops. It is the only time during the creation process in which we’re told that God stops, and He says, “It is not good.” That should get our attention.

It was not good because man was “alone,” so God made a neged (transliterated Hebrew) for him, which, according to Strong’s definitions, has a meaning of “a front, i.e. part opposite; specifically a counterpart.” And the “counterpart” was clearly connected to a biological difference because the difference allowed for procreation. It is an embodied difference, not a psychological or cultural one, such as what is meant today by gender identity and transgenderism.

In other words, God “fixed” the aloneness of Adam not merely by creating another human being—by sameness—but by biological differentiation. It was just another aspect of the differentiation process demonstrated throughout the entire creation process. God differentiated the light from the dark, the night from the day, the sea from the dry ground, and so on.

To deny the difference between the male and the female is to deny God’s image in us and, moreover, to deny what God said was good for both the male and the female.

But, when it comes to this aspect of the image of God—this God-declared good differentiation between male and female—this politician basically said, and I am paraphrasing, No, I don’t mean or want to include that part of God’s image in our humanity. I don’t want the Legislature to enact a law that would communicate to our children in a tangible, understandable way this God-ordained difference by having biological males use one shower and biological females use another. In fact, I’m okay if our public schools confuse the differentiation and deny that part of the image of God.

While that last sentence may seem harsh and not what that official would intend to communicate, it is, in fact, the necessary implication. If the usage of such facilities is not being designated based on biological differences, then their usage must be based on some other consideration, which cannot be the relevancy of biological differences.

Perhaps this person1, and others among our elected officials (and would-be officials) who are thinking this way (and there is an increasing number of them), will rethink this issue. Until then, I’d rather the image they convey politically just leave the image of God out of it.

NOTES

The name has been withheld so that the point being made is not obscured by anyone’s affection for or allegiance to the person quoted. It is not my purpose here to impugn anyone or, in this context, influence his or her policy position, which I think is intractable anyway. Besides, other elected officials would say and then do the same thing.

David Fowler served in the Tennessee state Senate for 12 years before joining FACT as President in 2006. Read David’s complete bio.

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